Babbler
Benny Green
Letters of Macaulay. Volume IV: September 1841 -December 1848. Edited by Thomas Pinney (Cambridge University Press £19.50) Macaulay's reputation has not worn as well as he would have hoped, and not nearly as well as his admirers confidently expected. Too many aspects of his temperament have since fallen into disrepute for us to accept him with the same trusting awe which once animated the electorate of Leeds and Edinburgh; the provincialism of his attitude towards a more venerable culture than his own when he served on the Supreme Council of India, his self-confessed lack of interest in so many areas of experience—Macaulay is almost the only eminent Victorian to have eschewed both Art and Science—the ciceronian theatricality of his style, his compromise between politics and literature, between history and Whig propaganda, between instruction and entertainment, all of these things have rendered him deeply suspect to an age which is uneasy at the prospect of a self-made man who despises the mob. But of all the crimes Macaulay committed against the canons of subsequent good taste, it is his irrepressible optimism which damns him the most. When we are all so busy computing the meagre life expectancy of our own planet, do we really have time for the Panglossian complacency of a Macaulay?
The great difficulty is that in attempting to dismiss Macaulay, the reader finds himself lingering time and again over some aspect of the case which is too appealing to ignore. Even those who rejected him seem unwittingly to have paid him the most handsome compliments. We know what Melbourne meant when he said he wished he could be as sure of anything as Macaulay seemed to be of everything, but there is at least as much to be said for Macaulay's certitude as there is for Melbourne's trifling. A supposedly more serious charge is Bagehot's: 'he regarded English history as a process leading up to the debates in which he took part.' But as that is exactly what English history was, and as the degree of Macaulay's awareness of the tides of history and his commitment to channelling their energy is always desirable in a cabinet minister, it is hard to laugh with Bagehot after all.
The strictures of a man like John Morley fall into rather a different category, because there are few more persuasive testimonials to a man's character than that John Morley should disapprove of it. Morley thought Macaulay's 'unsound,' but not unsound enough, apparently, to ignore; Morley's famous speech in rejection of the Boer War is pure Macaulay pastiche, down to the last rigged antithesis, the last hammered anaphora. In fact, Macaulay's bombast is not quite so antiquated as we sometimes assume; there was at least one item of demagogy from Franklin Roosevelt which might have been composed by Macaulay's ghost. The prose is admittedly more.difficult to take, perhaps because it is too formal for an informal age. It may well be true that the ranks of Tuscany forbore to cheer, but the phrase 'lays of ancient Rome' fell foul long ago of Sunday Supplement facetiousness. And there must be many readers in the same position as me, unable to digest much of Macaulay apart from passages in his History of England.
That is why the Letters, edited with faultless and unobtrusive scholarship by Thomas Pinney, are such a delight. Macaulay emerges as a friendly soul, an understanding critic, a kindly and vulnerable scholar, whose letters exude charm and consideration. The latest volume in the series takes Macaulay from his move to the Albany and the completion of his essay on Warren Hastings, to the publication of the first two volumes of the History, a period of especial interest because it encompasses the process of that intensifying of intellectual passion which finally caused Macaulay to back away from the political arena in search of literary salvation. The years from 1842-48 are the ones in which Macaulay saw that his life's work must be the History, years in which, as time slipped by, the task became foreshortened in his own mind, until in the end what he had planned as the pageant of 150 years emerged as the incident of a mere fourteen.
In all the intense intellectual activity reflected by the letters, there is one aspect in particular which will fascinate every reader who has ever tried to sell a random paragraph to a random editor. This is the debate between Macaulay and Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinbureli Review, concerning literary diction. Napier appeared at times to confuse his own function with that of the author of the book of Genesis, and wasted a considerable amount of Macaulay's time by taking exception to words like 'bore' and 'wench' ; in a letter to Napier dated 18 April, 1842, there is a model defence by Macaulay of the diction of, comparatively speaking, casual journalism as distinct from what he calls, rather quaintly, 'regular history.' That
Macaulay, who has often been accused of vulgarity, should have justified with such scientific precision the use by a writer con currently of two opposing codes of conduct, may seem to justify the charge, but every professional writer will know what Macau lay is getting at, and sympathise. Finally, there is always a thrill in reading, in context, a remark subsequently recognised as the great watershed of a man's life. In November, 1841, we find Macaulay explaining his intentions to Napier, 'I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.' I am certain that old Babble-tongue would have agreed with me that the price of this book is a perfect disgrace.
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